My guest today is my good friend Darren Laponi, chair of chemical and sustainability engineering at the University of Rochester. In a school, he's actively marketing to undergraduates. He's one of the best mentors and educators I've ever met. I was devastated when he left UC San Diego, and he just told me that most people shouldn't even be in this program. I wanted to know if he meant it.

Is academia like kind of an irredeemably clout chasing, you know, kind of money-grubbing pursuit of attention, maybe significance when we have importance? What is academia? What does it become and where do you think it can go?

This is a tough nut to crack because when we have promotion and tenure cases, we want to be able to look at a metric that is reliable, that's standardized across fields, which is impossible, but at least sort of within fields. So we look at H-index, we look at number of citations, we look at number of grant dollars brought in per square foot of lab space that the individual has. But at the end of the day, you want to know what did that person do? What is the accomplishment? How have they made a deep and lasting impact in the field? And that accomplishment is quite difficult to judge. And oftentimes, there's a time component too. It's a impact as a lagging indicator. What if a paper gets one citation today, but then it gets a thousand citations 10 years from now because it became so important? And so just like capitalism takes, leverages the human competitive instinct, we're kind of stuck with these metrics in order to evaluate each other and to give each other raises and promotions. So it's an imperfect system, but it's what we have. Only one out of every 20 PhDs becomes a tenure track professor. The numbers are not very favorable for the median person who wants to go into the field. And it's just, I don't mean median in any pejorative sense, I just mean statistically. It's a very difficult path. No one knows that a grad student did the work, that a grad student who made 35 grand a year and forwent retirement savings for their entire period of training and probably won't recover it by the time they retire, that the financial burden is probably more so on them than it is on the taxpayer. So I was trying to tell the story of the people who had to go to grad school because they couldn't do anything else. They went into research because they could not do anything else. Like an artist or a musician or a chef, that's what they had to do, knowing that the chances of getting an independent faculty position are, you know, one in 20 or lower. Would I have studied inorganic chemistry and space groups and oxidation potentials and the Schrödinger equation if I was not forced to? And I'm a highly motivated, really nerdy, really nerdy individual. Would I have done that for four years, 11 years after high school before I got my first job? I don't think I would have. I was lucky in the sense that I had scholarships and my debt load was not high. If you look at the net present value of my decision by the time I retire, was it a good decision? I don't know. I probably would have done okay making $85,000 with a bachelor's degree. There are people for whom it does not make sense to go to college. I would say that perhaps the minority of individuals should be going to a four-year institution because the debt load is so high, because the prevalence of high-paying jobs for individuals who are willing to tolerate certain types of activities can be quite high. And I think that's where we need to focus on as educators in the area of building physical items. We need to rematerialize work and encourage people to work with their hands to encourage the building and craftsmanship and artisanship that's informed by theory because those jobs are going to be the hardest to replace. Physical AI is going to require an enormous amount of energy and also materials science and mechanical engineering innovation along with the enormous energy demands in server farms. For example, that's quite a long way off, in my opinion, laundry folding robots notwithstanding. And so there will therefore the next several decades, there will be room for somebody who will be designing a telescope, for somebody who's designing a satellite, somebody who's designing and building a reactor that can strip perfluorinated alkyl substances from drinking water. And it's the tolerance, it's the grit to be doing that with one's hands. Right. I